American film, stage, and television actor James Woods was born on April 18th, 1947 in Vernal, Utah as James Howard Woods. His father Gail Peyton Woods was an army intelligence officer who died in 1960. He grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island. He graduated from Pilgrim High School in 1965 near the top of his class. He earned a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He dropped out during his sophomore year in 1967 and then he then headed off to New York with his fraternity brother Martin Donovan to pursue aspirations to appear on the stage. After appearing in a plentiful of New York City theater productions, Woods scored his first movie role in All the Way Home (1971) and followed that up with meager supporting roles in The Way We Were (1973) and The Choirboys (1977).

However, it was Woods' cold-blooded performance as the cop killer in The Onion Field (1979), based on a Joseph Wambaugh novel that seized the attention of movie-makers to his on-screen power. Woods quickly followed up with another role in another Joseph Wambaugh movie adaptation, The Black Marble (1980), as a sleazy and very unstable cable-T.V.-station owner in David Cronenberg's mind-bending movie Videodrome (1983), as gangster Max Bercovicz in Sergio Leones mammoth epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and also scored a best actor Academy Award nomination as abrasive journalist Richard Boyle in Oliver Stone's gritty and unsettling Salvador (1986).

The decade of the 1990s started off strongly to him, with high praise for his role as Roy Cohn in the television production of Citizen Cohn (1992). Woods was also impressive as sneaky hustler Lester Diamond who cons Sharon Stone in Casino (1995), and also made a tremendous H.R. Haldeman in Nixon (1995). He portrayed serial killer Carl Panzram in Killer: A Journal of Murder (1995), and then as accused civil rights assassin Byron De La Beckwith in Ghosts of Mississippi (1996).

In 2006, Woods starred in the political thriller End Game with Cuba Gooding, Jr. He makes an appearance as himself in the first episode of Entourages third season. Woods appeared as Richard S. Fuld, Jr., Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, in HBO's Too Big to Fail (2011), for which he gained an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Mini-series or Movie.

He achieved critical praise for his voice work as Hades in the 1997 Disney film Hercules and he won a Daytime Emmy Award in 2000 for the role in the follow-up television series for the 1999 season. He also appeared as a fictional version of himself in the episode of The Simpsons entitled "Homer and Apu" and in six episodes of Family Guy, which is set in Woods' native state of Rhode Island. Other references in Family Guy include the local high school, James Woods High School, and a forest named James Woods briefly mentioned in "The Fat Guy Strangler". In 2004, Woods voiced Jallak in the animated film Ark and Mike Toreno in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Standing tall with a height of five feet and eleven inches, he has a pleasant personality. He is an American by nationality and he is of white ethnicity. His pictures are widely searched. He has a net worth of $20 million. Woods is known for having a brilliant intellect and formidable IQ. Woods turned from a political scientist to a full-time actor in 1969. He continued his legacy and is still working on various projects. He dedicated his life to acting and did very well.

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